Hmei7

Profile narrative

Hmei7 is a hacker known by the alias Hmei7 and has been publicly linked to activities originating from Indonesia. The actor first appeared in open‑source reporting in mid‑2014 when a defacement of the ESET Spain website and four of its Spanish domains was attributed to this handle. Subsequent reports from early 2014 describe Hmei7 as part of a group of Indonesian and Pakistani hackers who compromised multiple subdomains of the AVG antivirus company. These sources consistently identify the individual as operating from Indonesia, without providing any additional aliases or real‑world identity.

The observed targeting of Hmei7 focuses on companies that produce security software, specifically the European antivirus vendor ESET and the global vendor AVG. In the ESET incident the actor altered the public facing web pages of the Spanish site and four related Spanish domains, replacing the original content with a defacement message. For AVG, Hmei7 reportedly gained access to eleven subdomains that handled downloads, license renewals, free trial offerings, education solutions, job postings and test environments, again substituting the legitimate pages with a defacement notice. The effect of these actions was to render the affected domains inaccessible or to display error messages, causing disruption to normal service availability. No public reporting attributes financial gain, espionage or data theft to these operations; the documented outcome is limited to service interruption and reputational impact through visible defacement.

The tactics described in the sources involve web‑based defacement rather than the deployment of malware or the use of sophisticated payloads; the actor’s method appears to rely on exploiting vulnerabilities in web applications to gain administrative control and replace index files with custom messages. No specific malware families, exploit kits or tooling are mentioned in the available reports, and there is no indication of persistent access, lateral movement or data exfiltration beyond the visible page changes. Attribution to any state sponsor, criminal consortium or organized hacking group is not established in the public material; Hmei7 is presented as an individual actor who occasionally collaborates with other Indonesian hackers such as SultanHaikal and Pakistani actors like DR@CUL@ in separate but temporally related campaigns. The most notable operations publicly attributed to Hmei7 remain the June 2014 ESET Spain defacement and the January 2014 compromise of eleven AVG subdomains, both of which resulted in noticeable service disruption and were widely mirrored on zone‑h archives.

Incidents

Attributed incidents are available to members.